home from work and was not heard from again until her body was discovered in Stockholm in 1996. Hidden under the floorboards of Dr. Gregory’s attic bedsit was a manuscript which, in spite of its incendiary nature, has been made available to a select few well-vetted readers in the name of free speech, the very manuscript the reader now holds in their hands. Dr. Gregory details her early life: the loss of her family, her adoption into a gang of similarly orphaned children, her specious arrest for treason, and her friendship with the ethereal Elsa. It is from Elsa that Dr. Gregory learns to enter a meditative trance state that allows the girls to remove themselves from the harsh environment of the Belgian prison in which they are both incarcerated. After Elsa’s presumed death in a prison riot, Dr. Gregory evolves the technique from meditation into a tool that can actually alter a subject’s relationship to the traumatic memories they carry within them. As her proficiency grows, however, Dr. Gregory’s research is put to uses she never intended. Eventually, her psychological treatments become the foundational tool for enacting the Age Ten Protocols, wherein children are separated from their families and conditioned to forget their emotional
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of a wealthy Parisian family. Rachel lives with her younger sister and works at the Social Security office. Pierre is a translator at the nearby American military base. Rachel’s parents are not much present, her mother due to ill health, her father because, being Jewish, he spent the war out of the country; he appears only to criticize and reject his offspring. Rachel’s love for Pierre is unanalyzed, naïve. He seems extraordinary and unconventional, unlike her small-town suitors. When he explains that he will never marry her, because he needs to feel free and because her family isn’t wealthy, she understands, even though “When you went out with a man, and you weren’t married, you know, in those years, you were like a piece of trash.” Likewise when she gets pregnant and he refuses to come see her, choosing instead to vacation in Italy. She raises their daughter, Christine, on her own while working full time during a period when most mothers stayed home. She calls the girl “my little fawn,” and Christine adores her. Then Pierre reappears, now married to a rich German with whom he has started a family. Rachel implores him to recognize Christine officially. They’re moving to Reims for her new job, and no one there knows her history. At last, complaining, he agrees, and Christine takes his name, Angot. He begins to visit, taking her to restaurants and away on weekend trips, encouraging her studies. Starved for paternal affection, adolescent Christine is entranced by her father’s style and money, his education. A chasm opens between her and her mother. And a terrible secret divides them. The slow, painful healing of their rift is deeply moving. (When, a grown woman and mother herself, Christine begins to call her mother Maman again, it’s “like a little bell at last repaired.”) Described without overstatement or sensationalism, raw and honest, their experience rings brutally true. What began as a love story ends as an indictment of generations of internalized misogyny, antisemitism, class warfare, and the abuse of power. Disturbing, powerful, a deeply personal story that is also searingly political.
YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS
Cranor, Jeffrey & Janina Matthewson Harper Perennial/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $16.99 paper | Nov. 16, 2021 978-0-06-306662-5
A recovered manuscript details the establishment of the New Society after the ruinous Great Reckoning almost ends mankind—but does it describe a triumphant return to peace and equity or the desecration of that which makes us most human? Dr. Miriam Gregory was a visionary psychologist whose research into the link between memory and trauma led to some of the foundational tenants of the New Society, the system of political and social governance that sprang up in the shambles left behind by the Great Reckoning. In 1977, she failed to return |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 october 2021
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5
